The first movie ever shot in Hollywood was D.W. Griffith’s In Old California, a Biograph melodrama about California in the 19th century when it was still part of Mexico. Before returning to New York, Griffith stayed there for months and filmed multiple pictures.
David Wark Griffith, an American movie director, was born on January 22, 1875. He pioneered several parts of cinema editing and enlarged the art of narrative film, making him one of the most significant figures in film history.
Griffith’s picture The Birth of a Nation (1915) produced money for investors, but it also sparked debate since it portrayed African Americans negatively and praised the Ku Klux Klan. In response to his detractors, he created Intolerance (1916). Several of Griffith’s later films, including Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921), were commercially successful, although the huge production and promotion costs he incurred often resulted in commercial failure. By the time of his final movie, The Struggle (1931), he had made almost 500 films.
Griffith created United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, allowing them to direct their interests rather than relying on commercial studios.
Griffith was born on a farm in Oldham County, Kentucky, on January 22, 1875, to Jacob Wark’s Roaring Jake Griffith, a Confederate Army colonel who later became a Kentucky state representative, and Mary Perkins (née Oglesby). Griffith was raised as a Methodist and went to a one-room schoolhouse, where his older sister Mattie taught him. His father died when he was ten years old, and the family struggled to make ends meet. Griffith accepted a job as a stage extra in the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s Professional Jealousy in 1908, where he met cameraman Billy Bitzer and his career in the film industry was forever transformed.
At the Hollywood Masonic Temple, a public memorial service was given in his honor. Mount Tabor Methodist Church Graveyard in Centerfield, Kentucky is where he is buried. The Directors Guild of America presented him with a stone and bronze memorial at his gravesite in 1950.
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